Towards an Incarnational Architecture, Part I:
Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity

For a long time now, I've been thinking about a Catholic architectural theology based on St. Thomas's explanation of the relationship between body and soul. Since many great architectural theorists of the past have compared the building to a body, it seems a good place to start.

if one continues this analogy, modern architecture, views the building as Cartesian dualism considers the body. The soul, if it is anything, is merely a motor or a disembodied and perhaps somewhat ineffectual presence. Likewise, the underlying theme or symbolic "point" or purpose of the building is often reduced to mere mechanics today. "The house is a machine for living in," as Le Corbusier put it in his Towards a New Architecture. Let me remind the reader that Corbu based his modern houses on airplanes, the most uncomfortable spaces for living ever wrought by human hands outside of Oliver Cromwell's Torture Emporium.

However, as Aquinas reminds us, the intellectual principle is the form of man--the soul is united to the body as its form (I.lxxvi.1.) Moreover, the whole soul is in the whole body, as St. Augustine wrote (De Trin. vi.6). Kreeft puts it thus: "the soul, 'the first principle of life' unites the diverse organs [as nothing else can]. The words of a book…[are] thematically unified by the book’s theme or point… The form (or theme unifies and contains the matter (words) rather than vice versa. The same is true of man’s soul and body" (Summa of the Summa, fn. 18, p. 256).

The composite body-soul that is Man can teach us two things about authentic architecture. One of them is the purpose and symbolic meaning of a building is extremely important. In the past, the thematic essence of the building (what the Baroque architects called the concetto) was expressed symbolically throughout the building in both the structure and the iconography chosen by the architect. Furthermore, the physical-archetypal essence (what the Renaissance architect Alberti called lineaments or "bones"), the bare geometric lines of the building that are often all that most modern architects would design, were not left bare like bones but, in a sense, incarnated in the flesh of columns and ornament, which in turn were not sharp-edged but often subtly curved with entasis and inspired by the proportions of the human body, as Vitruvius tells us.

Architecture makes the invisible visible, and a Christian architecture must always look back to the temple in which the real Incarnation took place, the womb of the Virgin, assumed body and soul into heaven and who dwells with Her most holy Son, who built the Temple anew in Three Days. Amen.

Tomorrow: Towards an Incarnational Architecture, Part II: The Sursumactive Structure.